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Jan 6, 2021 · Degas made around 1,500 paintings, monotypes and drawings of ballet dancers, but they have a troubled history. Edgar Degas. Although it enjoyed unprecedented popularity in Degas’ era, the...
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In the 1870s, Degas helped pioneer Impressionism. Like his fellow French artists, he employed quick brushstrokes and used vivid color in his paintings. Unlike other Impressionists, however, Degas was not preoccupied with light and nature. Instead, he was fascinated by movement and people—making ballerinas his ideal subject. “People call me the pain...
Degas' pastel drawings of dancers are among his most well-known works. Many of the pieces, including The Star(1878), capture the spectacle of the ballet through idealized compositions, frenzied sketches, and backdrops spotlit with saturated color. Similarly, some pastel studies, like Dancers at the Barre (1900), show the ballerinas as they warm up....
Unlike his pastels, Degas' oil paintings of dancers do not typically showcase on-stage performances. Instead, pieces like The Dance Class (1874) andThe Dance Lesson (1879) offer a realistic glimpse into what goes on behind the curtain, featuring the girls as they quietly stretch, calmly rest, and listlessly listen to their instructor. These pieces ...
Unlike pastel drawings and paintings on canvas, Degas did not produce a comprehensive collection of ballerina-inspired sculptures. However, the one that he did create—Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen—has become one of his most famous dancer depictions. Degas sculpted the wax figurine in 1880 and exhibited it at the sixth Impressionist exhibition the fo...
April 2003. The Dance Class (La Classe de Danse), 1873–1876, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas Wikimedia Commons. “Yesterday I spent the whole day in the studio of a strange painter called...
The Dance Class. Edgar Degas French. 1874. On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 815. This work and its variant in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, represent the most ambitious paintings Degas devoted to the theme of the dance. Some twenty-four women, ballerinas and their mothers, wait while a dancer executes an "attitude" for her examination.
Artist: Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris) Date: ca. 1880. Medium: Pastel and charcoal on blue-gray wove paper. Dimensions: Sheet: 19 1/4 × 12 1/2 in. (48.9 × 31.8 cm) Classification: Drawings. Credit Line: The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 2001, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg ...
Degas represented dancers in almost all mediums. His first known paintings, pastels, and drawings of dancers closely followed his two-dimensional works of horses in the 1860s. He apparently began making sculpture of dancers in the 1870s, the years during which he exhibited two-dimensional dance subjects so regularly that critics dubbed him the ...
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Dimensions: 28 x 23 1/4 in. (71.1 x 59.1 cm) Classification: Drawings. Credit Line: Gift of George N. and Helen M. Richard, 1964. Accession Number: 64.165.1. Learn more about this artwork. European Paintings at The Met.
